Today I flashed my XO
(gotten through the G1G1 program
from OLPC) to release
8.2 and I'm very pleased to see all the progress made
with the whole stack. There are huge improvements to Sugar:
nicer navigability and usability, higher responsiveness, a
wider set of improved activities, tremendously improved
neighbourhood view/network management, and of course the
localizers/translators
have done great work to reduce the
language barriers.

In short there are a lot of very nice touches here and there
to make the whole experience even better for the many
children out there. Big kudos to all involved :-)

Besides Dejavu with its own peculiar license, various
quality open fonts released under OFL are currently
available by default. You can see choose them from the Write
activity (Abiword-based):

And using the Terminal activity you can easily install extra
open fonts packaged by the great Fedora Font
SIG from the repositories via yum:

Ecolier Court

Ecolier Lignes Court

Gentium

Gentium Basic

Andika Basic

Padauk

Libertine

Jomolhari

Inconsolata

GFS Artemisia

GFS Baskerville

GFS Bodoni

GFS Bodoni Classic

GFS Complutum

GFS Didot

GFS Didot Classic

GFS Gazis

GFS Neohellenic

GFS Olga

GFS Solomos

GFS Theokritos

Edrip

Doulos SIL

Charis SIL

Brett

Silkscreen

RoadStencil

We'll see how some of these open fonts can be included by
default in the deployment target where it makes sense.

High-quality redistributable and modifiable fonts certainly
have a key role to play in the
education goals of such a project. This is where a
community-recognized license like the OFL taking care of
issues like embedding, naming collisions and artistic
integrity - allowing them to be used without problems as
well as further maintained by the open font community - is
crucial.

SugarLabs and OLPC have huge challenges to tackle in terms
of i18n, so I'm glad to see the progress made in enabling
wider language support by picking open fonts allowing
designers to extend the fonts to meet local needs.

It's also a joy to see how beautifully the fonts render on
the tiny but high-res XO screen and to imagine the many kids
learning to read and write in this environment. Seeing the
beautiful shapes of your mother-tongue script has to be a
good motivator to learn...

moyogo, I'm really looking forward to more info about
your work on fonts for African languages... So what about
the reactions to your talk and the FLOSS culture/methodology
aspects? Follow-up discussions?

How's the atmosphere of the conference? Beside
some pictures of
the conf it's good to know some talk slides will be up
on the site :-)

A few sessions I think are really worth attending and
contributing to if you happen to be in St-Petersburg for the
AtypI
conference this week:

Open fonts and African needs by Denis "moyogo"
Jacquerye, Dejavu's co-lead about the special needs of
African languages and the various ways in which a FLOSS
approach is useful.

Fonts
for every language: New types for cultural treasures by
Victor Gaultney of SIL about advocacy and awareness-raising
for the many writing systems still in need of proper fonts
and ways in which initiatives in the wider open font
community are helping tackling these challenges and how you
can participate.

Crossing borders: The best of different worlds by Frank
E. Blokland about integrating various tools and platform in
a font design workflow. Hopefully raising awareness about
the maturing open font design toolkit: inkscape, fontforge
(with spiro goodness) and various helper scripts...

Also there will be
some
talks and debates
on the future of fonts on the web. I hope these discussions
about web fonts will take into account the needs/goals of
all the stakeholders.

Open fonts - as in fonts released under the Open Font License -
certainly have a key
role to play as the W3C recognizes. And for this IMHO
the next step is parsing
the font metadata and showing it to the user so they can
know more about the fonts used in each page: for example
which designer,
supporting organisation/foundry is involved (there are
links for that too), some description and among
other useful things if it's an open font or not via the
License and License URL fields. The Opentype
spec
has provision for enough metadata placeholders.

Well I guess I should start blogging and join the
web-based pow-wow since Planet Open Fonts is
now up and has
already gathered a number of very interesting posts.
(There's also a Satellite open fonts
vcs tracking VCS commits for various font-related
community repos).

So what's been happening in font land these days? We are we
in term of the open font community now?
Glad you asked because actually things have pretty much
exceeded our initial expectations! Despite the many
challenges to tackle - especially with
the more complex writing systems - we're well on our
way I think! Looking back at the beginning of
our research around the ideal community model for fonts back
in 2001 with Victor's Gentium project
and the Writing
Systems Implementation work with
UNESCO it's tremendous to see the concerted efforts
from many amazing people out there to establish what is
needed for a collaborative typographic community
over the past few years...

But first of all, why do we actually need open fonts at all?
What's the purpose of all this?

Let's put it this way: if Gutenberg's
genius and consecutive transformative reforms are attributed
to "movable type" designed to accelerate and make the
creation of books easier and cheaper, then the open font
movement with its Open Font License is
designed to go even further and do this at the Free Software
level: allowing and encouraging the moving of glyphs and the
smart code (modern information age type if you will) around
more easily, extending and fixing fonts to make it easier to
publish content in as many languages as possible...

The consultation for an ideal collaborative type design and
distribution model has been done with much input and
refinement from various communities: many different
conferences have seen discussions with key
community figures, lightning talks, BoFs, talks, demos and
workshops covering aspects of the open font community's
projects and
challenges... Events like Solutions Linux in Paris, RMLL in
Dijon, WSIS in Geneva and Tunis, GUADEC in Vilanova, Akademy
in Glasgow, UDS in Paris and Prague, Debconf in Edinburgh,
LGM in Lyon Montréal and Wroclaw OOoconf in Lyon, TLM in
Boston Glasgow and Wroclaw, AtypIconf in Lisbon, TUG in San
Diego, BachoTeX in well Bachotex, GNU Hackers meeting 2008
in Bristol. There were also a bunch of IRC meetings,
confcalls and mailing-list discussions.